Jamia Wilson is one of the latest authors to be added to the collection on ReadingZone Live. Jamia has been a powerful force in the social justice movement for nearly a decade. She is an activist, a feminist, a storyteller, a media-maker but more than anything she is a natural-born thought leader.
She is a leading voice on feminist and women’s rights issues and her work and words have appeared in, and on, several outlets. These include New York Magazine, The Today Show and The Washington Post.
In her interview, hosted on ReadingZone Live, Jamia talks about giving young people a sense of hope and inspiration and an understanding of their innate sense of their own self-worth.
She holds Anne Frank up as an inspirational role model; she talks about how she had a strong voice even when some people wanted her to be less vocal.
Her new book ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ is aimed at inspiring readers from all types of backgrounds to get a glimpse into the contributions and lives of black people who have made a real difference in the world (both the familiar household names and some lesser known individuals). Her aim is also to give them a resource to go to when they need to feel a sense of empowerment.
LGfL hosts a number of resources you could use with pupils to explore some of the issues Jamia explores in her narratives.
For example, if you want to discuss fairness, rights and responsibilities with your class you could use Developing British Values. This resource provides high-quality, safe and relevant teaching materials that foster deeper understanding and informed debate amongst young people.
‘Developing British Values’ is both a standalone learning resource in its own right (via the Core Ideas menu) and also as a gateway to other ideas, assets and materials (via the Related Themes and Further Assets and Resources menus) that can be used for one-off, dedicated activities, or for embedding core themes into a planned series of lessons.
Perhaps the endeavours of the pioneering explorers of the twentieth century could help pupils to further understand how self-determination and aspiration can help people to overcome even the most taxing of circumstances. Polar Exploration in the Heroic Age of Scientific Discovery resource provides a unique insight into the 'Heroic Age of Scientific Discovery'.
LGfL worked with the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University in creating this comprehensive resource, which includes:
- Video footage of equipment and artefacts from the most famous expeditions, complete with text transcripts of the expert explanations
- High-resolution photographs of objects featured in the video footage
- Journal extracts read by a descendant of a member of Captain Scott's Discovery expedition
- Interactive map of the Polar Regions with plotted locations of the multimedia assets
- The opportunity to meet a modern-day polar explorer and hear of his experiences living for extended periods of time in some of the world's most expreme environments.
British Antarctic Expedition 1910-13
If you want to further explore the idea of inspirational female role models then Women in Computing explores the role of women in codebreaking at Bletchley Park; they quickly learned the skills necessary to survive in this area and showed tremendous capacity for computational thought.
For a fictional, strong female character you could look at some of the vlogs produced for Space Adventures. The resource is based on the story of Tazz Anderson on her mission to the moon to bring back the valuable raw material ‘Dysprosium’ for use in smart devices back on planet Earth.
Jamia Wilson believes schools could encourage more conversations about difference, inclusion and presentations where they talk through the issues facing society and working towards solutions. She encourages young people to define themselves through their own life rules and by doing so, to live their most powerful life.
Therefore one further resource you may like to further explore with your pupils is Growing Up Around the World; it aims to help UK children understand the realities of childhood in different contexts. Strikingly, many of the struggles and challennges the children encounter are universal, from the UK to South Africa to India.
Please let us know if you use any of these resources or indeed have suggestions for how LGfL could further support you in school by posting on LGfL’s Twitter or Facebook.